Memories by John McGarry

John had a ‘pseudo girlfriend’ in the early 1960s; “She definitely
liked me, the most she even got from me was a peck on the cheek”. He
talked of the pressure to get married. He said that many of the fellow
pupils with whom he had had homosexual expe...

“Everybody cottaged, through cottaging I found out where the bars were!
Every bus station and every railway station had a cottage frequented by
gays in the 1960’s. ‘The train and bus stations were always a bit more
dangerous, there were always other ...

“There were some notorious cottages, such as the Silver Slipper on
Station Street. There was an underground one on New Street Station
before it was rebuilt and probably many more in the centre of town that
I did not know about. I would also go out to...

‘Victim’, starring Dirk Bogard, was released in 1961 and shown widely
across Britain. “He played the part of a barrister and was blackmailed;
he was a covert gay man. Bogard projected a great deal of sensitivity,
he was a top barrister with an opulen...

The main gay bar in the 1960s was the Imperial Hotel, which John
used when he discovered gay bars. “The Imperial Hotel was a Trust House
Hotel; oddly enough by then I was travelling and the main gay bar in
Nottingham was also in a Trust House Hotel. ...

After the demise of the Imperial Hotel most people went across the road
to the Trocadero, but the Temple Bar at the bottom of Temple Street was
also gay in the mid sixties. John said there were a lot of newspaper
reporters there for some reason....

“In the mid 1960s before they rebuilt New Street Station, on the front
was the station Hotel; roughly in the middle where the line of the
Pallasades is now was the Exchange Bar. You went down stairs and it was
a long white tiled bar, the first time I...

“The Sombrero was a coffee bar on Horsefair, roughly on the corner
where Holloway Circus is now. In those days one side of the pavement
onto Bristol Road was too high, so there was a double step to reach the
roadway. At ten o’clock when the bars shut...

“In the mid sixties when I first started going into the Trocadero, I
remember one Sunday night in November vividly. Laurie Williams came in
dressed spectacularly in a pure white raincoat, he said his ‘hellos’,
everyone called him ‘La Williams’. He co...